The Dark Side of Jazz Musician Culture

<p>The movie Whiplash came out in 2014 and it&apos;s about this young jazz drummer named Andrew Nyman, who is determined to succeed as a jazz musician, and he&apos;s driven by his demanding music teacher, Terrence Fletcher, who can be best described as a harsh, ruthless yet highly respected instructor who really has abusive teaching methods.<br/><br/>And Andrew the drummer, a student at college, can best be described as an overly ambitious young musician who is completely obsessed with improving and, of course, fulfilling his desire to be a great musician. <br/><br/>And when this movie first came out and I watched it I absolutely hated it. I hated it because to me it seemed like this completely wrong view of what it&apos;s like to be an aspiring musician or what it&apos;s like to be instructed by great jazz musicians.<br/><br/>Is it really this abusive, horrifying, stressful, deprecating experience? And for me, I just absolutely hated the notion that this could possibly be true. Or let&apos;s go to another movie that depicts jazz, La La Land, where Ryan Gosling plays a character, where he&apos;s this musician trying to make it, a jazz musician trying to make it in Los Angeles, and his personality type is that of a very narrow, single-minded, focused, overly obsessed musician who has to &quot;sell out&quot; by starting to play in a jazz fusion band in order to prove to his girlfriend that he actually can make a living in the music. <br/><br/>So really, even though I actually liked some of the depictions of jazz within this movie and what it&apos;s like to be a musician, I still hated the fact that it seems like the characters are just absolutely swarmed in this dark cloud that is raining on them with self-loathing, with obsession, with all of this negativity. And then I realized why I hate it so much. And it&apos;s not because, unfortunately, that it&apos;s entirely untrue, as I originally had felt when I first washed Whiplash. Sure, absolutely very exaggerated examples of a problem that can exist. <br/><br/>But n